Today is the publication date of the new edition of his book Fugitive Days, and now that the election is over, Ayers has chosen to speak out in his own defense in the pages of a democratic socialist newsweekly, In These Times.

By choosing this vehicle, Ayers is skillfully engaging in his own sanitized rewriting of history. His effort is to paint himself as just another honest dissenter, a man whose valiant socialist principles have caused the media to unfairly demonize him as a terrorist. All he did in his memoir, he writes, is to go back to those “exhilarating and difficult years of resistance against the American war in Vietnam.”

I have already on this site linked to my review of Ayers memoir. But anyone who actually reads it knows immediately that what he is defending is not opposition to the Vietnam War, but his own and his comrade’s record of terrorism. There were thousands of patriotic Americans who opposed that war — a miniscule minority supported or endorsed the actions of the Weatherman faction of SDS and the bombing campaign they undertook when they went underground. Indeed, most of the mainstream cadre of the organization viewed Ayers and his group as a force that undermined their own credibility and helped to isolate what they hoped was a genuine peace movement.

Ayers’ new apologia is, as one reads it, completely amazing in his disingenuous argument. He was active, he writes, at “a time when the world was in flames, revolution was in the air, and the serial assassinations of black leaders disrupted our utopian dreams.” Let us look at the last claim. Was he eluding to Martin Luther King, Jr. as one of those black leaders? If so, all one has to do is recall that Ayers and company, who supported “black power” and not non-violent resistance to segregation, considered King an Uncle Tom, and regularly blasted him as a sell-out. As for the assassination of blacks, one of the offshoots of his own group killed a black policeman in the Brinks robbery, and another killed a black school superintendent in Oakland, California. And of course, the Weather Underground saw Huey Newton’s gang of thugs, The Black Panther Party, as the vanguard of the revolution, and declared their own support for their activities. Newton killed plenty of blacks who opposed him, as well as others in gang wars over drugs.

Now, as a would-be good plain democrat, he has the chutzpah to complain of how the media has unfairly tried to paint him as “un-American, alien, linked to radical ideas, a closet terrorist….”
You get the idea. Perhaps it had something to do with the photo he posed for tramping an American flag underfoot, his open espousal of the glories of bombing in his memoir, and his espousing revolutionary socialism as his goal in his two year old interview. The late Irving Howe once said that Tom Hayden “gave opportunism a bad name.” I would revise that estimate, and give that award to Ayers.